Spotify plays leading to increase in iTunes music sales

Rather than damage sales of digital albums, making music available on Spotify may be pushing more users to iTunes. That's according to one classical music label

While Paul McCartney, Adele, Coldplay, Metallica and more millionaire musicians are fearful that making their music freely available on Spotify could kill album says, one record label says it's actually seeing an increase in iTunes sales thanks to the streaming site.

Swedish label X5 says the launch of its 'Classify' Spotify app saw streams of its 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music increase by 412 percent. In turn that saw a 50 per cent spike in the album's sales on iTunes.

The bump allowed the album to top the classical chart on iTunes and reach 152 in the overall sales charts.

X5 says that its stats prove that free plays on Spotify are not preventing people from buying music to keep, but could actually be encouraging them to do so, so that they can keep the album.

CEO Johan Lagerlof says: “People use the Spotify free service as a discovery tool and then go to iTunes for buying their music. The recent sales spike for '50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music' follows the same trend we have seen in Sweden, where there is a positive correlation between Spotify streaming and digital sales.”

The Classify app, launched as part of Spotify's own desire to become the 'OS of Music' earlier this year, allows users to browse classical music, by mood, genre and era. The app seems to have made the music easier to discover and users are responding by heading over to iTunes.

Whether that would work on the youths, who're tuning in to the latest Nicki Minaj monstrosity, is a different matter altogether.